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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
This revised and updated edition gathers interviews and profiles
covering the entire forty-five-year span of Woody Allen's career as
a filmmaker, including detailed discussions of his most popular as
well as his most critically acclaimed works. The present collection
is a complete update of the volume that first appeared in 2006. In
the years since, Allen has continued making movies, including
Midnight in Paris and the Oscar-winning Blue Jasmine. While many
interviews from the original edition have been retained in the
present volume, nine new entries extend the coverage of Allen's
directorial career through 2015. In addition, there is a new,
in-depth interview from the period covered in the first edition.
Most of the interviews included in the original volume first
appeared in such widely known publications and venues as the New
York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the New Yorker, Rolling
Stone, and Playboy. A number of smaller and lesser-known venues are
also represented, especially in the new volume. Several interviews
from non-American sources add an international perspective on
Allen's work. Materials for the new volume include pieces focusing
primarily on Allen's films as well as broader profiles and
interviews that also concentrate on his literary talent. Perhaps
Stephen Mamber best describes Allen's distinctiveness, especially
early in his career: "Woody Allen is not the best new American
comedy director or the best comedy writer or the best comedy actor,
he's simply the finest combination of all three."
In this pioneering work, sixteen historians analyse individual
films for deeper insight into US institutions, values and
lifestyles. Linking all of the essays is the belief that film holds
much of value for the historian seeking to understand and interpret
American history and culture. This title will be equally valuable
for students and scholars in history using film for analysis as
well as film students and scholars exploring the way social and
historical circumstances are reflected and represented in film.
U?pon its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho divided
critical opinion, with several leading film critics condemning
Hitchcock's apparent encouragement of the audience's identification
with the gruesome murder that lies at the heart of the film. Such
antipathy did little to harm Psycho's box-office returns, and it
would go on to be acknowledged as one of the greatest film
thrillers, with scenes and characters that are among the most
iconic in all cinema. In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond
Durgnat provides a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative,
enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she
watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of
spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing
and shot composition. In his introduction to the new edition, Henry
K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination
of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film
studies' 'Grand Error'. In the course of expounding Durgnat's
root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about
Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller
also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat
claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William
Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's
mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early
1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his
pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho
became one of its first objects.
Bringing together the human story of care with its representation
in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care
narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in
life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and
film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's
illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human
decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as
Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as
Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as
why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of
writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about
caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire
starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the
challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative
arts.
Fans and critics alike perceive Wong Kar-wai (b. 1958) as an
enigma. His dark glasses, his nonlinear narrations, and his high
expectations for actors all contribute to an assumption that he
only makes art for a few high-brow critics. However Wong's
interviews show this Hong Kong auteur is candid about the art of
filmmaking, even surprisinghis interlocutors by suggesting his
films are commercial and made for a popular audience. Wong's
achievements nevertheless feel like arthouse cinema.His third film,
Chungking Express, introduced him to a global audience captivated
by the quick and quirky editing style. His Cannes award-winning
films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love confirmed an audience
beyond the greater Chinese market. His latest film, The
Grandmaster, depicts the life of a kung fu master by breaking away
from the martial arts genre. In each of these films, Wong Kar-wai's
signature style-experimental, emotive, character-driven, and
timeless-remains apparent throughout. This volume includes
interviews that appear in English for the first time, including
some that appeared in Hong Kong magazines now out of print. The
interviews cover every feature film from Wong's debut As Tears Go
By to his 2013 The Grandmaster.
The cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is celebrated as challenging the
status quo. From the political films of the 1970s through to the
more existential works of his later career, Vrasidis Karalis argues
for a coherent and nuanced philosophy underpinning Angelopoulos'
work. The political force of his films, including the classic The
Travelling Players (1975), gave way to more essayistic works
exploring identity, love, loss, memory and, ultimately, mortality.
This development of sensibilities is charted along with the key
cultural moments informing Angelopoulos' shifting thinking. From
Voyage to Cythera (1984) until his last film, The Dust of Time
(2009), Angelopoulos' problematic heroes in search of meaning and
purpose engaged with the thinking of Plato, Mark, Heidegger, Arendt
and Luckacs, both implicitly and explicitly. Theo Angelopoulos also
explores the rich visual language and 'ocular poetics' of
Angelopopulos' oeuvre and his mastery of communicating profundity
through the everyday. Karalis argues for a reading of his work that
embraces contradiction and celebrates the unsettling questions at
the heart of his work.
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